re: #110 Nyet

Good faith or bad faith has nothing to do with it. Only evidence does. First of all, the whole stage form is not the Odal rune (unlike the Masked Singer stage pictured above), only part of it is, so one has to pick and choose what one sees, which in turn makes a coincidence the more likely explanation, a prank being the second most likely one. Second, CPAC caters to mainstream GOP kind of neo/protofascism, not the WWII-minded skinhead crowd (which it excludes, having banned the likes of McInnes and Fuentes), so it had zero motives to do this in the first place.

“Only part of it is.” The part where the principle speakers will make their presentations.

I don’t know why you’re so invested in this. Why are you so willing to give CPAC the benefit of the doubt, when the GOP has been trafficking in Nazi symbology for years?

As I noted the last time I was here, Matt Schlapp has been photographed hanging out with actual Nazis and Klansmen. Bill Maher and Michael Steele have called Matt Schlapp out for consorting with known Nazis, and neither of those guys are friends of liberals. Why give him the benefit of the doubt now? And it’s not even “well, maybe it could be a Nazi rune and maybe not” but a vehement denial it could be at all.

I’m willing to accept that it’s not if those responsible for it can give an explanation of what happened. They are instead attacking liberals rather than explaining. DARVO is a tool of the conservative toolbox, which the longer it goes on, the more it convinces me they intended that stage to do exactly what it’s doing: Promoting a Nazi rune.

I admit I do not know much about stage design, but from what I am able to glean on-line, the basic design is first done as a simple drawing submitted to the designer. That person works up a number of presentations to show to both their own employer and those hiring their work. Even the simplest designs are checked to ensure they don’t do something that will get them sued, like infringe on a copyright.

After the people paying for it agree to a design, the work is contracted out (or done in-house) to construct the set.

This fits into the rule about conspiracies: The more people involved, the less likely a conspiracy is the explanation. Aside from the people actually doing the construction, dozens of people would have been involved in allowing such a prank past them without a single one thinking “you know, that looks like a Nazi symbol which comes up at the very top of a Google search” both at the design company and at CPAC.

McInnis claimed (and right-wing blogs parroted) at the time he was kicked out of CPAC (along with Enrique Tarrio) because “liberal media outlets complained” (he specifically cited Mediatite, as if CPAC could give a hoot about what Mediatite writes about CPAC).

I can’t seem to find the reason McInnis was kicked out aside from his explanation splashed across search engines in endless conservative blogs (and one YouTube video). As best as I can tell, they didn’t give a public explanation (though they only kicked him out after his presentation, not before).